We know school districts are laying off teachers by the thousands, and we know firing teachers reinforces all the things that are bad for the future of our children and our country: cutting early childhood education, increasing class sizes, narrowing curriculum, and shutting down programs and services that individualize the school experience to different student interests and abilities.

This week, Media Mattersreminded us that the Senate is about to vote on the President’s planto “prevent teacher layoffs and get more teachers back in our schools — 400,000 jobs.” Right on cue, Think Progresspointed out that the choice our senators face is to decide whether they are for “hundreds of thousands of American jobs or are they for letting millionaire and billionaires get away without paying their fair share.”

As Stan Karp of Rethinking Schoolsexplains: “The same corporate elites and politicians who accept no accountability for having created the most unequal distribution of wealth in the history of the planet — and an economy that threatens the health and well-being of hundreds of millions — want to hold teachers accountable for their students’ test scores. They even want to use similar instruments to do it.”

The message that public school teachers bring to OWS is by no means lost on the young people who make up the majority of the demonstrators. Not only do they experience firsthand the loss of learning opportunities, but they are increasingly apt to, literally, get stuck with the bill. As education professor Willie Hiattexplains in an op-ed that appeared in Lexington, Kentucky media:

Our students are graduating into debt peonage (the average debt is $22,900, according to the Wall Street Journal) and joblessness as far as the eye can see. The next bubble to burst could be the nearly $1 trillion in student loans. Forgive protesters for connecting the dots: Wall Street crashed the economy, which wrecked state budgets, which meant higher tuition and fewer grants and scholarships, which led to more private loans. The home-equity decline means fewer families can pay for a liberal-arts education on second mortgages alone.

This is not the future that we promised to our children. Writing as a guest at Amanda Ripley’s blog,Marie Lawrence puts forth the idea that OWS is mostly about education:

We know that the Occupy Wall Street protest is partly a response to corporate greed, but I suspect it also reflects the disconnect between our aspirations and our reality. It feels like the engines of social mobility (namely education) are failing us.

(hat tip: Alex Russo)

The reality that we are starving our children’s means of getting an education and then saddling them with the costs, while at the same time making it harder and harder for them to get a job, is in stark contrast to what we’ve always been told the American Dream is all about. Teachers know this because they see it first hand. Students know it because the consequences come crashing down on them the hardest. It’s time for everyone else to get this.

Despite what The Washington Post says, students and families have been ill-served by the current secretary of education, and the federal government's role in education policy may be forever diminished.

About Jeff Bryant

Jeff Bryant is an Associate Fellow at Campaign for America's Future and the editor of the Education Opportunity Network website. Prior to joining OurFuture.org he was one of the principal writers for Open Left. He owns a marketing and communications consultancy in Chapel Hill, N.C. He has written extensively about public education policy.